Jonathan Haidt

Quotes

1. Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

   p. 104

2. 

   Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don't.

   p. 181

3. 

   Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger […]: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

   p. 172

4. 

   The lesson Buddha and Marcus Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: "Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it".

   p. 25

5. 

   Gossip and reputation make sure that what comes around - a person who is cruel will find that the others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully.

   p. 55

6. 

   Egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.

   p. 209

7. 

   Religions are moral s. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that […] influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass […] That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for —Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order. (It means, literally, "normlessness.") We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

   p. 313

8. 

   Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies; on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other side was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness.

   p. 134

9. 

   If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

10. 

    Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

    p. 366

11. 

    Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil. […] When I returned to America [from India], social conservatives no longer seemed so crazy.

    p. 126

12. 

    So now we have three models of the mind. Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery. Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the emperors of Rome, who divided the empire into eastern and western halves. Who is right?

    p. 36